Don’t Bomb Iran

A feasibility study to increase the power output of a gas-fired power station in Yazd by using solar energy has been drawn up by a multinational consortium. The project is led by German engineering company Fichtner, which says on its website “The cost of generating power from the ISCC is lower than the cost of generating power from the gas turbines.” Solar energy is concentrated in parabolic troughs which follow the sun during the day, and the heat is used to generate steam.
They propose increasing the energy output of the plant by first installing modern combined-cycle gas generators and that “By further upgrading with a solar field, an additional investment of $138m will result in an additional annual net electricity generation of 156 GWhe/a from solar energy. By comparison, the investment required for a solar stand alone (SEGS) power plant of the same solar field would be $163m and producing 131 GWhe/a of electricity from solar energy.”

The consortium is apparently in discussions with the Global Environment Fund.

By my calculations, on the above basis, the solar power will cost less than 3 cents per kilowatt hour, compared to about 6.7 cents per kwh as is estimated for any new nuclear power plant in the USA. For more, see my discussion of these figures